Human Experiences, Proximity, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things

Beacons Meet WiFi: Cisco Meraki Has Its Eye on Connected Spaces

Bluetooth LE beacons have shifted beyond prototypes and pilots into large-scale distribution. But this shift has brought us bumping up against the downside to a beacon’s elegance and simplicity. Because if a beacon is a relatively simple (and dumb) device, how do you intelligently manage them at scale?

One company thinks it has a solution. Meraki, a division of Cisco, launched a WiFi end point which can both act as a beacon and monitor devices in the area, report back to a cloud-based dashboard, and allow you to manage and shape WiFi traffic at the same time.

I spoke recently to the Meraki team. Adam Weis and Simon Tompson gave me an overview of their system and approach. For a company that’s managing massive networks of WiFi end points (70,000 hotel rooms in one case), they know a thing or two about fleet management.

And as beacons shift into distribution at scale, their approach will both help relieve some of the pain of beacon monitoring while offering the possibly larger advantage of being able to shape WiFi traffic and monitor WiFi networks from the same intuitive dashboard.

Beacons Call Home

The beauty of iBeacon (the trademarked term by Apple for its preferred configuration for the open standard of the Bluetooth Smart devices) was its simplicity. Apple did the heavy lifting in thinking about how beacons could be configured, provided easy-to-use software tools to help you create apps, and then stood back while the media branded the beacon industry with the iBeacon brush.

The move by Apple helped to accelerate an industry. By opening up support for beacon detection (and using your phone or tablet to broadcast as a beacon), we finally had a single standard that would work across all the major phone platforms. And by making the tools simple to use, it spurred a wave of innovation and testing which took advantage of the fact that a beacon doesn’t actually do very much.

Like any radio transmitter, a beacon transmits a signal. The signal contains a small packet of data (which also helps protect battery usage on both the beacon and the user’s phone), and that data includes unique ID numbers, some power and battery data, and a signal strength – all of which are used to identify which beacon you’ve detected and how far away you are.

But as the industry rapidly matured, this simplicity also started to show some cracks.

There was a scramble to make developing beacon detection for Android as simple as it was for Apple. And with Apple willing to enforce its trademarks and proprietary specifications, we started seeing separate beacon broadcasting specifications emerge, with a better-known example being the AltBeacon standard.

Beacon manufacturers emerged and took advantage of how relatively simple it was to build a beacon. But their simplicity came at a cost: it’s easy to create a beacon, configure it, put in a coin cell battery, and attach it to your wall.

But the beacons didn’t do much more than their original purpose. They broadcast a signal but they didn’t receive anything. If you wanted to reconfigure them or monitor their battery you needed to use an app while standing next to the beacon.

Your beacons, in other words, had no way to call home.

Managing Beacons at Scale

For a retailer, the idea that you’d deploy thousands of beacons across hundreds of locations and have no simple way to manage or monitor the devices without sending out staff seemed like a non-starter.

In the early days of the industry, more than one beacon company told me that managing your beacons wasn’t necessary: the devices were so cheap you could just throw them out when they died. But try telling that to a national retailer (or even a large museum!). Because the cost of training staff and sending them out to pop a new beacon on the wall was an instant deterrent to large installations.

The solutions included payloads embedded in user apps, extending the battery life through improved beacon performance, embedding beacons in light bulbs, or plugging them in. By making beacons last longer, the need to replace them would decrease.

But it was clear that beacon fleet management would quickly become a differentiator for the companies that could manage it well. Companies like Netclearance Systems launched a cloud management system and Kontakt.io recently launched its Cloud Beacon.

These solutions relied on placing another device in a store or venue: a sort of “hub” which could both call home and send/receive data, and could connect with beacons in the area in order to update their firmware, change their IDs, or monitor their batteries or performance.

In a World of WiFi, We Have An Endpoint

But Meraki thought it had a more elegant solution. Because why add another device to your location when you already need a box for the most pervasive endpoints available: WiFi.

The company has changed the game for how institutions manage WiFi infrastructure – moving us from the dark ages of what often looked like a command line interfaces to an elegant cloud-based solution that had a lot in common with the most intuitive dashboards available.

This was industrial scale WiFi management with a dashboard your mother might even love.

They took the pain out of managing WiFi endpoints. Organizations ranging from universities to hotel chains deploy, manage, monitor, secure and shape traffic for often widely distributed systems – and with Meraki do so in an intuitive way. (They were so successful that Cisco snapped them up).

So Meraki had a simple premise: since you’re already monitoring your WiFi with their endpoints, why not also use that same dashboard to monitor nearby beacons?

And while they were at it, they threw in the capacity of their WiFi box to ACT as a beacon – a boon to a smaller location that might not need a beacon in every aisle but just wants to send a beacon message when you arrive at the front door.

Their solution solved a simple problem: can I easily monitor all the beacons in the area, keep an eye on their batteries and other signals, and do something useful with the data?

Adam Weis, a brilliant guy and someone who helped drive a lot of the thinking behind the Meraki approach, explains:

Is Monitoring and Configuring the Same Thing?

The Meraki system is simple. It has an incredibly elegant and easy-to-use interface. It not only broadcasts as a beacon, but lets you monitor for ALL Bluetooth-enabled devices in its region:

It helps answer one of the more pressing challenges of fleet management: making sure your beacons are still working and that their batteries haven’t run out. By also monitoring other devices in the region, Meraki is providing a richer data set. I can now compare, for example, the number of total devices and then cross-tabulate that data to the number of beacon “app impressions”.

Meraki can’t, however, update a beacon’s firmware or update their UUIDs. To do that, you need to be able to “pair” with the beacon and the pairing is usually handled by tools provided by the beacon manufacturer. In many cases this might not be an issue – but an ideal scenario would be for Meraki to also partner with beacon manufacturers to allow institutions to also PAIR with the beacons via the Meraki dashboard.

In the meantime, it’s where solutions like the Kontakt Cloud Beacon come in – systems to manage your fleet of beacons and their ID numbers, but without the advantage of being a full WiFi endpoint.

WiFi + Beacon Is A Big Win for Many Use Cases

But let’s face it – in many cases, Meraki is enough. A library, for example, probably doesn’t need to swap the UUIDs of its beacons very often and firmware updates aren’t usually deployed, or rarely. And Meraki offers the advantage that it takes care of another key challenge in creating a ‘connected space’ – you need to manage WiFi access as well, shape WiFi traffic, and would prefer to do so in an intuitive way.

If your WiFi network can also ACT as a beacon and monitor the small fleet you have set up in your hotel lobby, say, then you’re getting two for the price of one: an intuitive WiFi management tool, a beacon, and the ability to monitor any additional beacons you place in your space.

Where Technologies Intersect

But there might be something more profound at play.

Because as beacons have shifted into larger deployments, they’ve also shifted into being just one of several technologies being used to ‘digitize physical space’. And it intrigues me to think about a future in which beacon detection can be combined with network monitoring and access management and then be used to shape new kinds of experiences in a location.

Today, you drop by a Starbucks and hop on a WiFi network. But in the future, a combination of beacon interactions and WiFi access might be combined to create new kinds of experiences.

We call beacons the “gateway drug to the Internet of Things”. They’ve been easy to understand. And they open our eyes to a world in which physical space is a new digital touch point. As they start to intersect with other technologies their management will become more complex but the types of interactions we can enable will also become more elegant, more innovative, and hopefully more useful to the end user.

Meraki has shown us one way that beacon technology will start to intersect with others. As we create the digital fabrics of physical space, it’s an early indicator that the beacon era is just getting started.

Great article Doug, I’m always amazed again when I logon to the Meraki dashboard and see that they’ve extended functionality again, they also have a great 24-hour heatmap that shows WiFi activity near the access points, very useful. Just today I was thinking of testing an MR32 AP of them and after reading your story I think that’s an excellent thing to do. 🙂 Great stuff!

Great read Doug. Then again we could go one further for small operations, the raspberry Pi has the capacity to have wifi, BLE and a web server on SD card..the total package without internet. just a local solution without the issues of security for small business, school classrooms reception rooms, gym/vet/etc..
the grand scale installations will be over relatively quickly and depending on how voracious the marketeers are perceived so to will be ble left on and connected over 3G/4G/5G
security is a sleeper in all of this.
my country has just passed laws requiring all internet metadata traffic to be held for two years…this includes all identifiable wifi data

As mentioned in the Meraki video how do you think they are able to track & visualise the locations of a skateboard moving around the office & the office dog? Couldn’t seem to see any demo or preview of this besides identifying the beacon itself.

There is no magic it’s just basic functionaility and that is why you dont see it in the video. Meraki is a great infrastructure platform for certain types of businesses and technologies but you really need to know its pros and cons before deploying. You can not track and visualize the whereabouts of a client (bluetooth, wifi) to a specific part of a room without doing triangulation between at least 3 access points. This is an difficult technology to apply to ones WLAN hardware and is not a part of a Meraki solution because its to expensive and do not conform to their vision of being easy to deploy.

Andrew, I think they’d need to build a specific view for that in the interface; the data is readily available, it just needs to be made and tracked for a specific client/beacon identifier. Would be very awesome to be able to view though! 🙂

It’s a pity Kontakt’s cloud beacons don’t even do fleet management yet, despite that being advertised as one of the main selling points of them. Would be interested to see how well this system actually works as a real life solution.

Great article! I am new to this technology and recently installed Merakis access points that have bluetooth beacon functionality. I am trying to figure out what software program intersects with these pads so as to use it. Do you have any ideas or recommendations

Hi Rob,
Normally you need an iOS or Android application to ‘sense’ that a beacon is transmitting in the area and then do something with that knowledge. (Often you also need a backend and some connection between information systems to get the best functionality out of an ibeacon solution in an enterprise setting)
For example:
You have an app for your company that gives you the ability to reserve a meeting room automatically when you’re in it for 5 minutes. (Just a quick example)
Your user would walk into the room where the Meraki AP resides with his smartphone and your app on that smartphone ‘sees’ that there’s a beacon near (and you know what AP with what UUID is in what room) and the app then sends a booking request to your Exchange server. The user doesn’t even have to get his smartphone out of his pocket for that.

You can also connect third party services to your Meraki Dashboard that analyze the gathered WiFi and Bluetooth data to let you know how many Bluetooth enabled devices where at what location; you might get some room density statistics out of that.

I hope you get the picture although I didn’t give the best example ever, I realize. 🙂

If you need more info you can always send me an email if you’d like.
(There are many good YouTube video’s and SlideShares out there that do a very good job at explaining what the technology does in detail)

Hi Doug, this is a very exciting article. What I understood is that Meraki’s WiFi device is able to control many different Beacom devices. But I wanted to know if it’s possible to communicate the WiFi point directly with the user’s phone, not via bluethoot but via WiFi, so the user doesn’t need to turn on his bluethoot, but just by turning on his WiFi he can receive data from near WiFi points. Is there a way to do that? Is Cisco working on that technology?

I’m curious to know, did you test this Meraki feature or only talk to them and read their press release?

As of March 2016 the Meraki access points that support “bluetooth monitoring” are, as far as we can tell, useless… if they work at all. We purchased several Meraki MR32s after questioning two different Meraki sales engineers and being told that they were well suited for managing our large-scale beacon deployments. In practice:

A.) The Meraki APs typically fail to detect beacons at all. We’ve occasionally seen a list of beacons in range of an MR32 appear in “Wireless–>Bluetooth clients”. More often the MR32s report “No Clients found” even when there are 20-100 beacons within a few meters of the AP.

We’ve reported this to Cisco and their “engineers have been working on it” since December, 2015. The Cisco techs we’ve spoken to have no training on this feature and zero familiarity with BLE or beacon use cases. I’m not terribly surprised that they have come up with no solution and no explanation for the problem in 90 days. If you have a contact at Cisco who actually knows anything about beacons I’d appreciate receiving their contact details.

B.) On the 1 or 2 occasions when we DID see a list of beacons (there’s no obvious pattern or explanation for why they would intermittently appear) the information provided is nothing like what the sales people told us the Meraki APs would give us. For example, in an area where I have 50 iBeacons well within range of the AP’s BLE receiver I get a list of about 40 beacons.

1 – I have no idea why there are less than 50 listed. Holding an iPhone running a beacon scanning app near the AP we pick up all 50 beacons, none with a marginal RSSI value.

2 – There is no way to determine WHICH 40 the Meraki is listing BECAUSE THE INFORMATION LISTED IN THE MERAKI DASHBOARD HAS ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENTIATING DETAIL.

3 – In fact, the Meraki has no useful detail whatever. Missing: UUID, major, minor, Tx power, broadcast interval, RSSI, battery level…NOTHING AT ALL. Even if they worked reliably, which they don’t, they wouldn’t provide any of the information we need to manage deployments.

So exactly what IS this feature supposed to be good for? I had bookmarked your review prior to buying the MR32s. I’d very much like to hear what made you think they worked or were useful.

The better solution to integrate wifi and interaction is not Meraki + ibecons, please review Seeketing nodes, they can detect wifi devices and interact with the with or without an App. This fill the gap, its the first true omnichannel solution, because even online (web or app) and offline (instote) behaviour are available user by user, so you can send messages ( push notif, sms, whatsapp, email, web push) depending of online and offline profiling when a mobile device is detected in a store using wifi. Take a look to http://www.seeketing.com, they start to operate in 2011, and they are working in airports, malls, retailers, etc

[…] problematic, because the devices use short-range Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. Some vendors integrate WiFi with their beacons, or have other workaround solutions, but those alternatives aren’t […]

[…] the devices are using short-range Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. There are vendors who integrate WiFi with their beacons or have other workaround solutions, although these solutions aren’t really […]

[…] the devices are using short-range Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. There are vendors who integrate WiFi with their beacons or have other workaround solutions, although these solutions aren’t really […]

[…] problematic, because the devices use short-range Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. Some vendors integrate WiFi with their beacons, or have other workaround solutions, but those alternatives aren’t […]